By Catherine Owen
Hard Electric
by Michael Blouin
Anvil Press (2024)
A reviewer’s main aim should be to offer intelligent critique within a context of the book’s intended audience, to distinguish between personal predilections and objective lack.
Mike Blouin’s Hard Electric, his third collection of poems, seam-bursts, from the explosively ouroboros cover to the scattershot excess of the pieces within. Narratives of aging to memory and boobs to bars are presented in mostly long-whittled lines with chop-chop (and coordinates) in between, their style an homage to Ondaatje, Carroll, O’Hara, McFadden, Bukowski and, in that melding, entirely Blouin’s allusively-riddled and meta-relentless own. When the author’s poems allude to their poesis, it compels, as with lines like, “it seems to me the difference between poetry and prose/is just the space left on the page” (Hit Me Baby One More Time), “these things don’t have to be all poemy and measured/ do clever things with language/I just wanted to get it down” (Georgia Grit), and “so many men seem to have given up on the process of/becoming seemingly having accepted as finished products the merest/of works in progress” (Tell Me Why).
One can either attempt to transcend the this-n-that throwaway nature of our era or one can do as Blouin and accurately represent its over-muchness amid a too-littleness. Genuine melancholia resides in pieces such as “Here is a Death Worth Considering” where references to Yosemite Sam and Greg Curnoe stir into worthwhile statements: “The thing is not to be bored, and not be boring…Look at a paper cup, the way light hits it,” while “White Bird in a Blizzard Lost” evokes the awful stasis in everyday pressures to “open that link” or answer the phone. Also, fourth-wall smashing pieces such as “Buddy, She Said” twist theatrical accounts into readerly prods like, “but I bet by now you’ve forgotten that girl I told you about at the/start,” and sorrow lingers in a poem that ends in joy, as in “Perfect Companion” where a hand is extended and the awareness that: “isn’t it marvelous that/sometimes something simple like a little piece of music/will keep us turning from the dark.”
Occasionally, a poem even implodes into a mythic space that assembles a tremor-zone as with “When I Was” about a young man’s epiphany of seeing each thing “new for the first time,” a transformation that concludes, “prophet burning in the fields of the dark, see/without a place to call home.” Or “The Stars Make No Noise,” a chunky prose ramble that, in the manner of Raymond Carver stories, gets to the point fast and movingly about death. Amid such massive moments there is a plethora of “oh well” poems, shrugs of words that sometimes provide textural balance, and at others, irritate with their utter so what-ness. I guess when you think that “no one really cares/about this book” (Or Even the Light on the Floor) in the coolest po-po-mo way then you are free to do whatever you want. The lovemaking poem in which the woman has a look on her face that says “him, again” (It Would Be) sure made me chuckle with recognition though, as did the line, “all dental hygienists are basically the same person” (Three Things I Have Learned).
Hard Electric is a likeable and relatable collection, irksome mostly in the teensy point size and the way an uppercased bill bissett’s cover quote isn’t in phonetics, a seriously remiss press decision. As Blouin states in “Well Jesus Christ and His Holy Biscuits” : “don’t get me started on italics/just don’t.”
Catherine Owen is a Vancouver-born, Edmonton-based poet, prose writer, reviewer, editor, podcaster, and performer. She’s authored 17 collections, her most recent being Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books, 2024), long‑listed for the Al and Eurithe Purdy Prize. Owen hosts the 94th Street Trobairitz series, runs the Ms Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws podcast, and teaches communications.